


Covenant Between the Idle Dead

by Nemonus



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, gently swipes Light concepts from the Star Wars EU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 13:36:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13008939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: They both have a nagging sense that when Andal introduced them wasn’t the first time they met.





	Covenant Between the Idle Dead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deepsix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepsix/gifts).



**1. **Scraps****

Zavala was raised on a beach. Grains of sand flecking his hands and salt so thick in the air he might as well be drinking the water, and the little silver Ghost beside him, telling him to attend to the eternal war. 

Ikora almost died beside him once. A rocket took the boulder next to her with a glancing blow, and then the follow-up turned into a firestorm. Zavala wrenched his Sparrow to the side and held the spot, expecting her to idle dead there until his own Light could bleed back enough into Ikora’s for her Ghost to raise her. The mingling told him that she was alive. Furious, dirt spattering her arms, she vaulted back onto her Sparrow and drew a sphere of Void energy in the air. The rocket did not fire again, and thereafter he remembered the burning cryogenic-cold of her Void Light.

The first time he met Cayde-6 he thought the strangeness in the Light came because Zavala was mourning Andal. Duty to the Tower, duty to the institution of the Vanguard, duty to the title Osiris had held before him — Commander Zavala kept these things in mind while he looked at the Exo and tried to figure out where they had met before. Had Andal brought him around before? It was hard to find a Hunter Vanguard, so having two with similar sensibilities was not only understandable but expected. Was Zavala tired, needing hot tea and warm quilts, searching for something to which the Light was answering _you have met Cayde-6 before?_ The sense of recognition did not fade. Instead it became manageable. It waited like a word unremembered, forever on the tip of his tongue.

 **2.** **Code Strings**

The simulation becomes clearer every time. It is not a memory: Cayde-6 is certain of this because it does not flow through the same channels, does not generate the same code. Recall feels linear: one after one after one, cause and effect (such as they are for Guardians, such as they are for the contested Earth). The Deep Stone Crypt feels disjointed, non-chronological, eternal. Zavala’s Light feels this way, also. 

Cayde-6 does not know whether the tower is his own memory, or his ancestor’s memory, or someone else’s entirely. Maybe it is a memory of only his body, wired into his brain at the spine but not originating with him at all. It is a tower that is not the Tower. He kills neophytes and civilians there, the ramen chef with the flowers in her hair, the Frames in their neat lines. He never kills either of his fellow Vanguard, not after he takes the Dare and does the ritual. He does not know why. 

He wants to _rattle_ Zavala. Cayde-6 thinks he understands Ikora Rey, although he does not entirely: she indulges his jokes, smiles with full lips and bright eyes. Zavala just _looks_ at him, and Cayde’s mind turns over and over trying to figure out why. It’s distracting, like an itch — an alert without pain. Cayde feels like he has experienced this before, that somewhere in his buried memories is the way to get Zavala to smile at him. 

 **3.** **Official Records**

**DATE: REDACTED**

**KEYWORDS: Fallen; Eliksni; Vanguard; Commander Zavala; Ikora Rey; Cayde-6; Ace of Spades; Scene-Stealer**

There are battles that feel _older_ than others. Timeless, if dreams feel timeless. Medieval, in the sense of iron and blood. The Fallen had brought a tank up to the Wall, in one of the opportunistic pushes big enough for the Vanguard themselves to attend to the forever siege. Ikora had a sword dragging behind her, a sliver of folded titanium she called a Scene-Stealer.

“Give me room,” she said, and Cayde popped the Golden Gun and fired down into the swarming ranks. 

One, two, three shots and then the tracers found him and he danced back. Rock crumbled. Cayde found himself falling, metal screaming against metal, the acute discomfort of chips ripped from his body through his fieldweave. He tumbled to the feet of the tank with the gun still ablaze. Fine opportunity — he fired upward. 

Zavala landed next to him, fighting like an Exo in a dream — no weapons in hand at all, just a shield wall and then his hands dragging Elksni around behind it. Zavala used the wreckage of the Wall like a crucible, pressing squirming arms against its stones until the Eliksni cried out and Zavala went for the eyes, ignoring shots fired against his plating — 

Cayde rolled to his feet, ducked behind the Titan wall while the last golden sparks dripped to his feet. Out of sight, Ikora’s Light sparked and crackled like a live wire to his left, held in reserve for now. 

The tank stepped forward. Then the hands that had broken Fallen arms were dragging Cayde back, out of the mud beneath the tank’s creaking feet.

“Let’s go,” Cayde thought he heard Zavala say, his breathing loud in the comm.

Cayde wriggled to his feet, patted Zavala’s shoulder blade as the tank reared against the City Wall. They stood like that while Ikora saw her opening — felt her see it, felt her mind like the intricate gears and golden ribs of the Speaker’s astrolabe. Ikora flew on a whirlwind of Void Light and stabbed the tank in the back of the neck with her Scene-Stealer. She leaned back and dragged, kicking her feet for a moment against the downward momentum of her own stab, and pulled the sword across as smoke and fire began to bleed out of the head of the tank. It collapsed beneath her. 

Afterward, the Guardians on the Wall took care of the Fallen’s main spearhead. The bugs scattered back from around the corpse of the tank. The soles of Ikora’s boots had melted into the cut across the neck, and she stumbled as she walked out of the tank, fixing the sword to her belt. Black goo trailed from her boots. 

Zavala reached out to help her up.

“We did it,” Ikora murmured, quietly enough that Cayde moved closer to hear. Zavala waved him into arms’ length. Cayde bristled at first, realized a moment later that it was in expectation of a rejection that was not coming. Zavala was usually so untouchable, body and mind — but now they had struggled and won, and Cayde sank against Zavala in a shrugging embrace that Ikora took up on the other side. She tugged them into the wreckage and they sat there against the smoking skin of the walker, watching the smoke rise, hearing the civilians cheer. 

Zavala, sure of the duty of the Vanguard and the eyes of the civilians on the Wall, stood first. 

4. **Unofficial Records**

They both have a nagging sense that the day Andal introduced them isn’t the first time they met. 

Or at least, Cayde-6 supposes they both have it. It might be normal Vanguard Light-muddling, a side effect they don’t write about in manuals. 

Cayde-6 reads people. He has to, in order to know how to call bluffs and push buttons and escape parties too boring or dangerous to endure. But Commander Zavala smiles with silvery lips and long canines, and you cannot just ask a man of such principle and gravitas whether it’s significant that you know and do not know him, that you actually _never_ saw him in that particular dream _ever_ and isn’t that strange? Isn’t he someone you know? Or does this nagging mean something else, that the three Vanguard are all shadow-selves to one another, reflections? Were they reflections _before_ Cayde took the Dare? Was he always partially here around this table with these people? The idea is disgustingly noble, disgustingly boringly fated. It makes him want to run. But that nagging is something that keeps him rooted. He feels like he knew Zavala when they were both first raised, how ever far down the muddled memories that was. He has to remind himself that he is not certain Zavala feels the same way. 

The question dogs him, but he doesn’t feel right asking. That would be _needy_. Cayde is not above asking assistance from a friendly Guardian or passing ranger but the Vanguard have jobs and Cayde respects their time. There is always a fight, now Oryx and now Ghaul — and besides, asking would make him look uncertain. If a person needs kindness Cayde will provide it, but his own curiosity is no kindness. He will not burden Zavala with this — not quite yet. 

* * *

 

His chance comes weeks later. In the hangar Zavala is examining a new weapon from Fenchurch’s wanderings, an automatic day-ruiner as big as one of those Cabal cannons. Zavala says something about the strange abilities of the thing, a sense of foresight that guarantees the bullets hate physics. Cayde isn’t paying much attention. The gun looks good in the hand, sure, but — “…like déjà vu. Insistent cryptomnesia, inflicted. Made useful.” 

“What now?” Cayde is leaning on a crate in his usual hangar hang-out, one leg stretched out behind him. Zavala is standing a few meters away from him, so Cayde makes sure his turn looks lazy. 

“Just examining this.” Zavala’s expression is calm, controlled. It’s weighty like the Wall. Cayde wishes he could see what it would look like for Zavala to emote. (Although there was enough of that after Mare Imbrium, wasn’t there, enough ragged looks like piles of rubble.) There are techs around, but right now their presence doesn’t matter. Cayde can’t see anything except Zavala and his need to ask this question, to receive this answer. 

“Do you ever get the sense that you’ve met me before? Like, you know, as if we were both experiencing déjà vu at the same time but like all at the same time and just with you and I, specifically. Is that normal Vanguard behavior because if not I thought that it might be useful for you to know, you know, in case it was the sign of some crypto … mania.”

Zavala sets the gun down. It _thunk_ s.  “Cayde, I don’t expect that you knew this already, but some Awoken and some Guardians feel that all the time.” 

“What?” 

Zavala rolls his shoulders for a moment before walking toward Cayde, circling around toward the hangar techs as he speaks. “Not all Awoken do, and not with all other people. Some people think that it’s because we have the memory of our original remaking in us, the thing that changed the first Awoken from human into us.” He’s meeting Cayde’s eyes as he goes, and it isn’t condescending so much as very intense. Zavala could make Cayde into a crater if he stood here long enough, that stare says, but he chooses not to. He chooses to stand here and _defend_ , like that Wall, and that’s as close to a Fireteam as Cayde has ever had. 

“But it doesn’t happen with everyone,” Zavala continues. “Usually with people who have a shared destiny, or a deep bond.”

“So which are we?” Cayde is made bold and shy together by the directness of the answer. 

“Probably both,” Zavala says. He just stands there with his hands on his hips and _lives with that_ , with a bond from which he does not want to escape into the pine forest, and Cayde sighs.

“So is this normal?”

“Not normal. But I’m honored to have it,” Zavala says.

Cayde sighs again. Considers and discards saying “I _Light-memory-bond_ you too, buddy,” or something, but it feels too small. The bond has been there after all, self-evident, pressing in on them. Cayde had looked into a kind of eternity, not like the Crypt, but a definition of non-memory, and was struck silent with the depth and strangeness of the respect idling in the Light. Cayde sighs and idles, and Zavala reaches out a hand in a glove of his own making, and Cayde shakes it.

 


End file.
